Code Editors of Choice for MacDesign & Development

Coda 2

Coda 2 is brought to us by a company called Panic and is one of the top coders for Mac. With an FTP client built in and other great features, it has set itself as one of the more feature full editors of choice and definitely one to beat. We have always found our selves coming back to this editor after trying other numerous applications.

Some of the features that always have us coming back are;

Built in SFTP

Code snippets

Intuitive file explorer

Ease of use and Transmit functionality

Themes and editor customisation

You can download the application for a free trial direct from Panic and then purchase the application from them directly for $99 (UK developers will get it for around £63 at the time of writing this).

We have so far received numerous updates since Panic removed it from the App Store which has seen improvements in both speed and reliability. They have promised continued support and updates so this is still a win win.

Sublime Text 3

If you were to ask a lot of developers what they use and if they have ever heard of Sublime Text, a lot of them would either reply, “Yes I have heard of it”, or “I use that everyday to code”. Sublime Text has become an editor that a lot of developers have grown custom to because of its ease of use and that it offers customisation via your own config operators. It really is a slick editor once you get used to it(which isn’t very long).

Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta but definitely still does the trick after being built on top of the success of Sublime Text 2. You can get and use the editor for free for as long as you want. It is treated as an unlimited trial, but you will get a pop to purchase a license every so often. We definitely urge users to do this, if you find yourself using this editor as your go to application and your getting an income from creating with it.

One of the downsides of Sublime Text is that it doesn’t come with it’s own FTP protocols built in, but we have found that a good resolution to this issue is to partner Sublime Text with Panic’s FTP client, Transmit. This FTP client is great at what it does but the functionality that makes this a great partner is that you can mount your FTP/SFTP connection as a virtual. Once you have it mounted, you can then access the folder via Sublime Text, just as you would a local folder.

Brackets

Last but not necessarily the least is Brackets, a free open source text editor built to blend visual design and coding into one package. This application has some great tools such as, inline css styling without leaving the current HTML file and also the ability to get CSS style tips from a PSD from within the application. Another great thing about Brackets is that it is updated pretty much every month so bugs will rarely go unnoticed and will generally be flattened with the next release.

Brackets will generally benefit the type of developer that creates static content rather than a dynamic website. At this current point, Brackets doesn’t support PHP, Ruby etc out of the box so it is targeted with it’s live preview and inline editing to speed up the development process on static HTML files. If that’s what you build then you will probably fall in love with Brackets.

Conclusion

Out of the above choices there is only one true conclusion we could come up with. The editor to use is the one that matches your coding approach best. Love creating beautiful HTML sites from scratch you will love Brackets inline styles and on the fly preview. Love the ability to customise your editor to how YOU want it and mostly develop local first or want to use Transmit, Sublime Text is probably for you. If you want features and some customisation but are happy to use something out of the box, then Coda 2 is probably for you. Coda 2 is our editor of choice and probably will be for a long time, but if it doesn’t suite your style then that’s fine. We’re all different after all.